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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26007883">365.</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/royalty_xo/pseuds/royalty_xo'>royalty_xo</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Station 19 (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 04:28:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,470</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26007883</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/royalty_xo/pseuds/royalty_xo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don’t wanna be sad anymore,” Vic admitted. </p><p>Victoria Hughes processes losing Lucas Ripley one year after his death.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Victoria Hughes/Lucas Ripley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>365.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The team was in the beanery, fixing their plates and preparing to have breakfast as was their typical routine before the start of every shift. Even Sullivan was present, now realizing just how vital this part of their day really was.</p><p>“Where’s Vic,” Maya asked? </p><p>Vic usually wasn’t one to miss waffles.</p><p>“She uh, she’s taking a personal day,” Sullivan responded as he took a bite of his food.</p><p>“Personal day? Since when do we get personal days?” Dean inquired, chuckling.</p><p>“Today’s the...it’s been a year,” Travis stated and looked down at his plate.</p><p>The team was smart enough to put two and two together and figure out what he meant.</p><p>“Is she okay?” Asked Andy. “Has anyone checked on her?”</p><p>“She’s at my place. She dropped by in the middle of the night. A complete mess, with tears streaming down her face. I asked her if she wanted me to stay home with her today and she told me she wanted to be alone.” Travis informed them.</p><p>“Captain, how are you?,” Warren asked. “I mean, you two were--”</p><p>“I’m handling it.” Sullivan said, cutting him off. “Excuse me, I gotta take this call.” He got up and excused himself, leaving the rest of the team eating their meal.</p><p>“Is he really handling it, Andy?” Maya inquired.</p><p>“He hasn’t really mentioned it. Which I’m pretty sure means he’s not handling it as well as he thinks he is.”</p><p>**********</p><p>Vic woke up after a few, terrible hours of tossing and turning. Today hit her like a ton of bricks. She’d been managing for the past year. Right after Ripley died, she’d grieved in her own way. She spent the better part of the past few months in a similar state to how she was now. She’d spend her off days balling her eyes out. She somehow managed to pull herself out of bed for shifts, but when they were over she constantly turned town invites to hang out with her friends in favor of mourning Lucas. She’d get a nice reprieve, when she remembered the good times; how he’d made her laugh when he told a joke or just how damn happy he’d made her. Vic was typically an upbeat, optimistic person, but she’d loved and lost and truly didn’t know if she’d ever get over it. Get over him. Jackson was a nice distraction, but deep down she knew she wasn’t really ready to move on. He’d simply been a nice way to manage the pain. Perhaps, if they’d waited until some of the pain had dissipated, things could’ve been different.</p><p>He’d made her feel like she’d never felt before. He’d made her feel whole. Not that she necessarily felt broken before him, but he made her feel loved, which was something she hadn’t felt in a very long time. Truthfully, she didn’t know she needed that.</p><p>**********</p><p>“You wanna go somewhere?”</p><p>“In public? Can we do that?” Vic asked him?</p><p>“I know that our jobs make our relationship less than ideal, but I don’t want us to feel like we have to hide all the time. I don’t want you to think you’re just some dirty little secret.” Lucas said.</p><p>“Okay, where do you wanna go?”</p><p>“I was thinking we could take the ferry to Bainbridge Island. I know it’s not in Seattle, but I wanna go somewhere that I can hold your hand in public and kiss you in public. I get that it’s still hiding but--”</p><p>Vic cut him off. “There’s a ferry that leaves in two hours.”</p><p>“So that’s a yes then?”</p><p>“My grandma used to take me there when I was little. It’ll be nice to go again. It’ll be nice to go there with you.”</p><p>**********<br/>
Vic woke up and checked her phone for the time. She was surprised to see that she’d napped for two hours. She got out of Travis’ guest bed and went into the kitchen. Finding a bottle of bourbon (Lucas’ favorite) she took it and a glass and sat down on the couch. It was only 11:37 am, but it was 5 o’clock somewhere, right?</p><p>She turned on the TV and downed the first glass she poured before refilling it. It was a weird thing she liked to do. The first few years after her Nana died, she’d spend the anniversary of her death and her birthday getting drunk. It was her way of compartmentalizing. She’d allow herself to have those two days to fully grieve and the rest of the year she’d put on a happy face and act like it never happened. Apparently she needed to do it for Lucas as well.</p><p>**********</p><p>“What are we?” Vic asked him the night after they’d gotten caught by Cam in the diner parking lot making out in her jeep. She could tell she caught him off guard. “You brought it up earlier that you wanted us to have more time outside of sex. Does that mean that this is something besides just sex?”</p><p>“I think it started out that way. Us just being...physical. But now…”</p><p>“Now it’s changed?”</p><p>“I think for the past four months, we’ve spent the majority of our non-work time together. I think I’ve opened up to you more in those four months than I have to anyone in years. I used to get off work and go home to an empty house and now I come home to you. I think that if anyone were to try and set me up with someone right now that I’d tell them that my girlfriend probably wouldn’t like that very much.” Lucas finished. The look in his eyes told Vic that he was serious.</p><p>“You want me to be your girlfriend?”</p><p>“I think we’re way past...casual and into full on relationship.”</p><p>Vic wasn’t used to relationships. Everyone she considered important in her life ended up leaving or dying. But she couldn’t deny that he was right.</p><p>“I think,” she started, “that I used to wait for a group text after shift wondering where we were going out to get drinks. And now, I look forward to texts from you asking what I want for dinner. I think that I’ve smiled more in the past four months than I have in a really long time. I think that if Andy or Maya or anyone else tried to set me up with someone that I’d tell them my boyfriend wouldn’t be a fan of that.”</p><p>She looked over to see him smiling one of his genuine Lucas Ripley smiles.</p><p>“So, we're doing this then? Because I know this is a big step.”</p><p>“Baby, I think we’ve been doing this for a while,” Vic replied before leaning in and giving him a kiss.</p><p>*********</p><p>During her fourth pour, there was a knock at the door. Vic figured it was probably a delivery guy dropping off a package for Travis since it was the middle of the day. </p><p>“Hughes, I know you’re in there. Open up.” </p><p>Was that Sullivan? How the hell did he know she was here? She walked over to the door and came face to face with her Battalion Chief. </p><p>“Chief--I…’</p><p>“Get dressed. We’re going out,” He said to her as he pushed past her and made his way inside.</p><p>Too tired and too confused to argue, Vic went back into the guest room and got ready. She threw on a pair of jeans and a sweater before making her way to the bathroom to brush her teeth and fix her hair. She looked presentable, despite the puffy eyes. But then again she was also sure she was nearly drunk, so there’s no telling how she really looked. </p><p>She went back to the living room and Sullivan led her outside to his car. They drove for about twenty minutes and ended up at Pike Place Market. Why on earth of all places would he bring her here? </p><p>“I used to come here after Claire died,” he started, somehow reading her mind. “I’d lost my parents young and I knew that sitting at home wouldn’t help me feel better. So I’d come here to try and get rid of the pain, the desperate full body ache that I couldn’t get rid of. And I’d force myself to accept the distraction. Walking around, browsing the different vendors.”</p><p>“Did it help?”</p><p>“Not as much as I wanted it to but to an extent it did. I was angry. Angry at Luke, angry at the world, angry at God for taking her away. But I was also angry at myself. I had cut off my best friend and I really needed someone to talk to. Being a man, my pride just wouldn’t let me forgive him at the time. I know that you didn’t lose a spouse, Hughes. But I knew Luke for a long time and he was helplessly in love with you. For years women in the department tried to throw themselves at him and he turned them down, but he didn’t...couldn’t do that with you. His eyes lit up when he talked about you the way mine did when I talked about Claire. I would come here and it would take my mind off of it. So even if I cried myself to sleep that night, at least for a few hours, I wasn’t miserable.” Sullivan finished.</p><p>“I...I thought I was better. I cried so much after Lucas died that I thought I didn’t have tears left to cry. But then these past few days--”</p><p>“It all came rushing back, huh?”</p><p>Vic put her head down in agreement. She felt ashamed that her Battalion Chief could see through her so clearly, But also, relieved at the same time. Yes, Travis had lost a spouse, but he wore his grief on his sleeve. Sullivan was angry at first, but somehow their pain seemed similar.</p><p>“You may not realize it, but I miss him too. Everyday. I have Andy now, and don’t get me wrong she’s great and I’m happy, I’m in love--”</p><p>“But she’s not Lucas Ripley.”</p><p>The two walked around for a while, and Vic even decided she could go for food for the first time that day.</p><p>“I don’t wanna be sad anymore,” Vic admitted. “And I know that there’s a chance I’ll find love again, but...he told me, that night after I delivered the baby in that accident that he didn’t wanna let me go. I guess I’m still just not ready to let him go.”</p><p>“Hughes, it took me over 15 years to get over my wife. Now I hope it doesn’t take you nearly that long, but he wouldn’t want you to be miserable. As much as coming here helped, it also hurt. She and I would come here about once a month; some of our best times were spent walking around here. After about 6 months, I told myself that I’d only come back on the anniversary of her death. Sort of a day where I’d let myself be pissed off and angry, and hurt, and heartbroken. Like you, I was tired of always being in my feelings.”</p><p>“I keep replaying what happened in my head. What if I had let him answer me at the scene when I proposed? What if we had agreed to meet that night instead of the next morning? What if I had just charged my damned phone? Then when he called--”</p><p>“What if I had gone in the building instead of him?” Hughes looked up at Sullivan in shock when he said that. “Yeah, it’s crossed my mind. I was still in such a rough place back then that sometimes I feel like it should’ve been me instead of him. Serve me right after ruining our friendship. But, you can’t keep beating yourself up over it. You’re not to blame for his death.”</p><p>“You know, right before he--he wanted to get a priest to marry us. At the time I wanted to spend his last moments, just the two of us, but I should’ve said yes. I passed up the chance to actually be his wife.”</p><p>“I used to think that I would never be happy again. Like I said, it took me a long time to move on, but that’s because I spent so much time looking for someone to blame instead of accepting what had happened. It’s a process.”</p><p>“I wanna be happy again,” Vic admitted. </p><p>They walked in silence back to Sullivan’s car.</p><p>“What’s the song?” He asked her.</p><p>“What song?”</p><p>“The one you’ve played on repeat that makes you think of him. The one you can’t stop listening to even though all it does is make you sad.” </p><p>“Landslide,” she admitted. </p><p>“Here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna play the song over and over until we get to your apartment. But, let this be the last time you play it. If you wanna be happy, you have to make the choice. Don’t forget how much he meant to you, but if you keep thinking about how sad you are that he’s gone, you’ll never heal.” He pulled up the song on his phone and the sultry voice of Stevie Nicks blasted through the speakers. Vic looked out the window as they drove to her place, tears threatening to fall once again.</p><p>She thanked him for the ride once she got to her place and she headed inside, letting his words sink in. Instead of heading to her fridge to resume the bourbon binge she started at Travis’, she went to her bathroom and ran the water to take a bath. She lit the few candles she had and scrolled through her phone and pressed play when she got to Happy by Leona Lewis. As she soaked away the emotions of the day, she let the words of the song consume her. She knew that she wasn’t completely fixed, but she truly wanted to heal the hole in her heart.</p><p>Vic drifted off and allowed herself to have one more Lucas memory for the day. </p><p>************</p><p>“What’s your favorite song?” Vic asked Lucas one evening as they were riding around Seattle. They often went for drives, no destination in mind, just to spend time with one another. </p><p>“Don’t laugh,” he prefaced as she smirked at him. “It’s I Will Always Love You. My mom used to sing it to me when I was little. Apparently it was the only song that would calm me down.”</p><p>“Aww, that’s really sweet, baby,” Vic said, reaching to hold his free hand.</p><p>“I’m sure yours is probably something I’ve never heard of.”</p><p>“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. So I guess that makes us both suckers for love songs.”</p><p>“I love you, Victoria Hughes,” Lucas said to her.</p><p>“I love you Lucas Ripley, and I always will.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This took forever, but writing it has been so cathartic. I would've loved to actually see something similar in an actual episode even if it is slightly depressing *sigh.*</p></blockquote></div></div>
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